Jpx0999 - Ngl, Gunga Mountain Raid was rather chaotic :v

Shahryar - Yes, he is. And he keeps proving it as the fic continues.

(***)

Aizawa left the governor's office, completely ignored vultures asking him to answer a few questions about the Gunga Mountain clusterfuck, and departed in a police car that was waiting for him, together with three bodyguards from the local Anti-Firearms Squad.

He would have felt slightly better if there was at least a single hero involved, especially a super one. Then again, it's just a few streets to some nondescript back alley from which Eclipse was going to pick him up.

It was called 'being constructively paranoid'.

He immediately receives an sms from no one else but their favorite machiavellian principal that Midoriya - pardon, Defiant, let's stick to his hero identity whenever possible - has managed to recover.

Thank god. It was much faster than Aizawa expected, and honestly, felt like a miracle. They surely needed any miracle they could get.

Council meeting in two hours to discuss the… revelations.

High time.

(***)

Tsuyu spent most of said two hours being absolutely pampered, hugged and cherished by her adoptive mother, who was absolutely terrified by Tsuyu being anywhere close to danger.

At least, she wasn't anywhere 'really' close to danger, hanging around with Mei and the others at the command post. She lost ⅔ of her combat skills when outside of water, and Izuku didn't think they really needed the remaining ⅓ on Gunga Mountain while helping Commissioner Aizawa plan the operation.

Tsuyu took the attention with perfect stoicism. She was never one to refuse physical affection from people close to her. And in her opinion, her mom needed that almost as much as she did.

(***)

Commissioner Aizawa entered the unofficial council room at UA. He left Tsukauchi to temporarily help deal with the fallout, Hawks was still incapacitated and Torino was VERY busy preparing 'proper' accomodations for his new guests (especially Mustard and Purity).

In short, he was alone.

Then again, it was really a small meeting. He came into the room to see Principal Sasaki flanked by Chiyo Shuzenji, and the Problem Child himself sitting on the side of the table.

"Looks like we're meeting each other face to face properly for the first time, Problem Child." Aizawa comments. Midoriya looks back at him.

He, frankly, looks just like Aizawa expected him to do. He was a mess. Slightly pale, clearly exhausted. More mentally than physically, but it's obvious that he needed some more rest on the other field too.

"I think I told you already that I'm an adult." Midoriya sighs. "At least change into a Problem Teenager, alright?"

"I'll think about it." Aizawa replies non-comittantly before sitting down. Principal Sasaki stares at him, clearly expecting something.

Right.

"Before someone has any dumb ideas…" Aizawa adds dryly. "I'm not planning to arrest Defiant, not even investigate what happened. Clear self-defense, especially as it was a planned murder on the Shie Hassaikai side. If you want to make sure that everything is as clear as it can be, we'll make it look like Bakugou accidentally blew himself up with his own quirk in combat."

Great, that's where his support for superheroism brought him. Manipulating evidence in order to cover up for something. Then again, they need Defiant, and Bakugou Katsuki won't be missed by anyone.

Midoriya gives him a faintly shocked stare.

"Look, kid, from my point of view, we both know that if he killed you he'd go for his own family next." Aizawa tells him. "Yes, what happened sucked, and in a better world you'd managed to arrest him so that Torino could lock him up for a distinct majority of his life. However, we live in this world. And in this world you stopped him from killing more people permanently. Seeing what sort of distress he put you in beforehand, it's a karmic death for him either way."

He is still bullshitting to a quite large degree. When police officers kill someone in the line of duty, there should be at least an investigation into whether it could happen differently. Criminals or not, they are citizens of Japan as well.

Going by the same metric he should probably arrest Sorahiko Torino for his stunt. Because he isn't buying the 'I tried to arrest him but it didn't work' thing. Torino was probably anxious to finally use his little girl.

You don't cause a goddamn CAR CRASH like that when you want to arrest the other side. You start a car chase instead.

Alas, they really aren't in a position to deal with all those frilly niceties. It's a national crisis, and for as long as they won't start putting severed heads of criminals on the facade of the local police precincts for intimidation, the public will most likely not care.

Midoriya looks vaguely relieved. Yeah, they have that out of the system, time for more serious things.

"So, what subject do we start from?" Aizawa asks. "Because honestly, I don't even know how to start tackling the massive pile of hot mess that the Gunga Mountain Raid brought to our attention."

"We've already made a decision or two, or to be exact Defiant did since those were Metahuman Network internal affairs." Principal Sasaki states. When Aizawa gives Midoriya a questioning look, he narrates the whole PR statement concept.

"Good start." Aizawa admits, once the tale is over. "Although, to be honest, the Meta-Liberation Army is the less scary new threat we have to deal with right now."

Nedzu and Destro both sound like goddamn headaches. All for One, in the meantime, sounds like a goddamn nightmare. They're two completely different things in Commissioner Aizawa's opinion.

"I don't think that we have an awful lot of things to do when the Council of Twelve is involved." Principal Sasaki states. "We know nothing about it except for a handful of names and their possession of a warp quirk. Attempting to investigate them more closely risks warning Hisashi Shigaraki that we're onto him."

Now the eyes are on him.

"You want us to do nothing?" Aizawa asks. Midoriya seems to have some concerns about that as well.

"Precisely." Sasaki replies, before correcting his glasses. "Shigaraki wouldn't have gotten so far if he wasn't a cautious man. Discovering that we know about him will have him make sure that he won't expose himself to us in any way or shape. Worst of all, he might decide to replace the leadership of the Network, and not just the Network, if he decides that putting us under mind control isn't feasible. We got a jump on him once, purely accidentally, do you think that we can do it twice?"

"Well, shame then that I just admitted to Yagi that we more or less know about his organization." Aizawa states dryly.

"It was an inevitability." Sasaki shakes his head. "It was obvious that the unknown new party had very good funding and was hostile to the Meta-Liberation Army. If we attempted to lie too much, Shigaraki would have noticed that something was wrong. Instead he believes that, due to lack of recovered evidence, we assumed that the whole facility was run by some rogue faction of the government or army. For as long as he thinks we don't know the whole truth about the Council of Twelve, he'll assume that we're still a potential asset to him."

"Or that we have his nephew in our ranks." Midoriya cuts in. Sasaki nods. "I have a feeling that would make him feel some very un-uncle-ish thoughts towards me."

"In fact, you should probably mention the assassination of the Commissioner General as the work of an unknown group, perhaps said governmental conspiracy, while talking with the prime minister." Sasaki then tells Aizawa. "Whatever happens, Shigaraki can't begin to suspect us of being connected in any way, shape, or form to the Moderates. He is controlling the government, and that's something that even in its current state we simply can't beat."

Yeah, now it makes more sense to Aizawa. It's still dangerously close to treason, but… is it still treason if you're acting against the government for its own objective good?

"So the plan is to take advantage of Hisashi Shigaraki's plans of taking control of the heroics…" Aizawa decides to re-summarize it. "... which will force him to push the government into giving us support, in order to lure him out as a part of his eventual attempt to mind control Defiant."

"Which will most likely fail." Defiant comments. When Aizawa and Sasaki give him a questioning stare, he decides to elaborate. "Hijack tried to mind-control me during our first meeting. Something in my quirk made me no-sell the attempt. I felt like I was going under for a few seconds, then just shrugged it off."

Well, that sounds like an asset.

"Probably an intentional element of One for All, installed by Yoichi to avoid Hisashi simply mind-controlling its owner into giving the quirk to one of his goons." Sasaki comments. "Or, god forbid, himself."

Yeah, Aizawa doesn't even want to imagine someone with both All for One and One for All quirks.

"When he tries to put me under and it doesn't work, it'll give me an element of surprise." Defiant admits, before suddenly shrinking a little. "I hate to ask about that, but… am I supposed to try to take him prisoner if that happens, or should I…" He pauses, while looking at them.

Aizawa and Sasaki exchange glances. Chiyo Shuzenji looks at Izuku with a lot of sadness in her eyes.

"From now on until further orders, SSS-Rank villains are to be killed on-sight." Aizawa decides to take the bullet. "We just don't have the comfort of half-assing it with people like Destro, Nedzu or All for One. I do understand that bringing this up right after Bakugou is… cruel, but…"

"No, I understand." Izuku sighs, clearly shrinking slightly. "I don't like it, I know I'm not supposed to like it, but I understand. What about the MLA?"

"I really think that it's something to be left to the government, whether it's controlled by Hisashi or not." Sasaki admits. "This is a nationwide political insurgency group. The police, as far as I'm aware, should mostly be offering assistance to the Public Security Intelligence Agency. t also actually works, unlike the National Police Agency, just…"

"... just if you were Destro, you'd attempt to place your moles in PSIA as a first choice of action." Aizawa cuts in. Principal sighs before nodding. "Yeah, this is a bit of a troublesome conundrum, we can only hope that All for One will do us a favor and come to blows with the MLA before trying to tackle us."

"That would be awfully convenient." Izuku tries not to sound dry about it, but he fails.

"I thought you were supposed to be the optimistic and idealistic one." Aizawa replies in kind. Midoriya gives him a slightly tired stare. "Right. So, we're waiting for All for One to come after us, and leaving trying to deal with the MLA to the government. Honestly, unless the government screws it up badly, the Reveal Day should severely impact the MLA's recruitment rates at least temporarily."

"Why would it- oh." Izuku realizes it. "It's hard to incite the metahuman crowds with 'they won't accept us!' when the government will begin to publicly endorse the existence of licensed superheroes."

"Yes, but Governor Yagi and his pet chief prosecutor had some interesting words to say about the influence that the meta-abilities will have on the economy, for example." Aizawa then added. "Such as the 'if we let them be freely used for commercial purposes, people like Witch are going to start putting non-metahumans out of business and this will lead to torches and pitchforks'. Who wants to bet that the MLA is going to shift its rhetorics towards free meta-abilities usage once the truth is out?"

Judging from the looks he's getting, no one wants to bet against him on that.

"Sounds anarchistic." Sasaki comments. "Very, very libertarian in the best case."

"I'd agree, if people weren't born with those." Aizawa comments dryly. "Is there a better way to mass-produce villains than to deny people opportunities they are literally born with? Especially if they are presently poor and living in times like those?"

"Not to mention making mutants even more miserable." Midoriya mumbles. When eyes shift towards him, he seems to freak out for a second, before controlling himself again. "You can't exactly mandate them to not use their quirks, right? It'd be like telling a human not to use his left hand ever again. This means that at least in menial work, they'll be able to outperform 'normals', while being allowed to do something that other Quirked couldn't. Add them often looking different or even 'animalistic', and…"

Aizawa groans loudly.

"Yeah, I can imagine that going into places that I really wouldn't want to be in." He admits. "It's like a 'creation of an embattled minority 101'. Great, just, great."

Mirai Sasaki corrects his glasses.

"I assume that the creation of a more… just system should be left for until the initial storm passes." He states. "What we have to focus on right now is the survival of a civilization. Once the legal systems and law enforcement more or less adapt to the phenomenon, we can consider making adjustments to the economic system. In the meantime, we're going to need all the money we can get, and experimenting with the economy tends to leave you with less money, not more."

Hard to disagree with him, to be honest.

Besides, it's not like any of them will have any direct impact on the governmental policies. They can influence them to a degree, but if they go too far, they can expect a lot of people to see that as metahumans taking over, especially if they will leverage a potential future Defiant's influence to get it done.

Ugh.

"Let's change the subject for a moment." Sasaki decides. "Chiyo, what can you tell us?"

The small doctor narrates the state of the injured. Most of them should make a full recovery. The one in most danger right now was Hawks, due to being very old and developing several associated health issues.

Like a severe heart deficiency. And early stage liver cancer.

Chiyo was taking notes of everything - mostly because there was a large chance that, once rewound and then grown to old age again, he would re-develop those. Meaning that he knew what to look out for in particular.

After several more visits from Eri (though they might be rarer now in the aftermath of Bakugou Katsuki's brief return), he should be out of his bed. 3-4 weeks before being back in business properly, and that's if Eri won't be forced to use her quirk on someone else.

Izuku still didn't know how to face the Bakugous after what just happened. Baby steps, yeah. Baby steps.

Then she moves over to the more… scientific subject.

"What Nedzu told Midoriya confirms what I already knew." Chiyo announces. "Quirks are bullshit."

Yeah, big mood, Izuku thinks. That was, at this point, Mei's opinion as well. Verbatim, actually.

"Discovering the whole 'Minus Ultra' genes thing actually makes things more complicated than I used to think." She then says. "This means that, basically speaking, we can't hope for a scientific way of telling people with meta-abilities from those without. This opens the field for a lot of made-up theories and straight up superstitions. Phrenology 2.0, basically."

"Phrenology?" Aizawa clearly isn't knowledgeable about that term. Neither is Izuku.

"Very old pseudoscience indicating that you could read one's personality from bumps on their skull." Shuzenji replies. "Popular in the first half of the 19th Century. Basically, people making up a bunch of scientifically-sounding indications of supposed metahumanity and rolling with it."

"Some are clearly different, though." Izuku points out. "My hair for example." Yeah, natural green hair was… dye could cover it, yes, but at the deepest level, it was something to tell him from the 'normals'.

"Your hair color isn't tied to a quirk." Shuzenji enlightens him. "It is some sort of side-mutation most likely tied to your quirk manifestation, its speed amplified with One for All being there as well. The thing is, it's not a 'quirked' mutation, just a normal one. Genetically speaking, I believe that even if your child is born quirkless, there is a large chance of them being born with green hair."

Oh, well, that's not good at all.

"Which will make the quirkless pick on them, due to standing out and supposedly being a 'quirked' person." Izuku states dryly. "I mean, it's an obvious 'tell', isn't it?" He adds, sounding vaguely sarcastic about it.

Chiyo shrugs.

"I wouldn't be surprised if sooner or later such children were also picked on by their quirked peers, due to being a 'failed quirked' or something like that." She then sighs. "Children or adults. Humanity is unreasonable sometimes."

Yeah, hard to disagree with that statement.

The best they can do is do their best to alleviate it. But it's going to be an endless fight.

"This also throws a wrench into our hopes of some sort of pharmacological quirk-suppressors for easier containment of villains." Chiyo then drops another bomb. "I'll be honest with you. If Yoichi Shigaraki truly managed all of that mostly alone, then he was basically a modern Leonardo da Vinci of medicine, genetics and bio-sciences in general. I'm good, but not that good. No one is. And even he failed to create those, despite it being the cure for the Quirk Singularity that he was looking for with all his might."

"Well, that's just splendid." Aizawa states dryly. "Maybe he just had that, what was it, Musician on a speed dial and asked him."

"I wouldn't be surprised." Chiyo sighs. "Locating all the Minus-Ultra genes alone was just… he had one case to work on, one case without those genes. How did he manage to trace what, low two digit-number of those genes? I'm baffled here. He had to discover some sort of underlying mechanism, he had to realize what those genes locked in human bodies resulting in prevention of quirk manifestation, and simply found genes working similarly."

"Can't you try to trace his research?" Sasaki asks. "Reverse engineering is always a thing, and I simply fail to imagine something that only a single genius could uncover out of all Mankind."

"Theoretically." Chiyo replies. "The problem is, we'd have to start by financing a trip to, say, Sentinel Island in order to kidnap a bunch of natives while hoping that Yoichi's virus didn't reach them. And that it's no longer around, otherwise us attempting that would simply infect them with it, resulting in the vanishing of the Minus-Ultra genes we'd need to study. Without that, I'll have nothing to compare to the current state of affairs in order to figure out what blocks meta-abilities from appearing."

"Old DNA databases?" Sasaki then asks again. "Pre-war attempts at sequencing the human genome should have…"

"Pointless." Chiyo cuts in. "Those were mostly stricken from publicly available records during the war, when the governments began to panic that their enemies might be cooking up some ethnic bioweapon and DNA databases of citizens became state secrets for a few years. Back then I thought that this was excessive and a result of a mostly pointless panic…"

"... but it's entirely likely that it was instigated by the Council of Twelve in order to edit the records and cover up the existence of Minus-Ultra genes and thus maintain their own monopoly on 'true' quirk research." Sasaki figures it out as the first one. Chiyo nods. "Well, that sounds absolutely stellar."

If sarcasm was a weapon, they would all be dead after that one sentence.

If the genes in question were somewhat important, they could hope for a significant chunk of geneticists out there knowing them in detail. If it was just a single gene, especially if a junk one outwardly, they couldn't expect them to realize that something was missing from the databases. A handful of them, none of which were there for the entire population?

Most geneticists that remembered them probably went 'Oh, I must have remembered it wrong' after not finding them once the records were public again. And even if they grew suspicious… no, scratch that.

Why would they grow suspicious? What was more likely, that all the world's governments struck a handful of unimportant genes out of history while working in perfect tandem during wartime, or that they were remembering things incorrectly?

Besides, even if they managed to puzzle up the list from memory, Sasaki is ready to sell his liver that the Council struck out some minor trash genes from the records (the type present mostly in some fringe populations) just to muddle the water more.

If not downright recreating Yoichi's virus while re-tailoring it to wipe out another segment of junk genes, just to render the masquerade perfect.

"Today it seems that the only remaining scientist that can even theoretically achieve all of that is Nedzu." Chiyo continues. "He is also the most likely person to actually have the list of Minus-Ultra genes - the Council probably made new backups after Yoichi's rebellion, but it's entirely likely that they lost it to the Moderates. It sounds like a completely valid target to those guys, at least to me."

"So unless Nedzu decides to spill the beans…" Izuku decides to comment. "... something that he explicitly stated he doesn't plan to do aside from that one moment of telling us… it is entirely likely that the way to actually crack the secrets of quirks through scientific method is going to remain buried. Forever."

After a few seconds of silence, Chiyo speaks.

"That's… entirely likely, to be honest." She sighs. "Unless we announce openly that the Dawn of Quirks was caused by a literal, if asymptomatic, plague, not to mention the meta-abilities being used for a world dominance scheme and basically developed with that in mind, we can forget about the scientific community figuring out anything, outside of some extreme coincidence. And doing that…"

"... will amplify the discrimination and violent reaction against the quirked." Aizawa comments. Yeah, this is just getting better and better. "Wait, isn't keeping this a secret from the world counterproductive to the rat's stated goal of avoiding the Singularity for his own self-preservation?"

"Nedzu appears to be clearly convinced of his intellectual superiority to anyone but Yoichi Shigaraki." Sasaki comments dryly. "It's entirely likely that he'll continue attempting to find the cure to Singularity for some time before deciding that it's a no go, since if he failed to do it, everyone else will clearly fail as well. I wouldn't be surprised if his plan B for that case was to establish some sort of functional, rat-sized cryostasis chamber, hide it in a self-sufficient bunker in the middle of nowhere and wait inside until Mankind kills itself off. With probably some new, biologically quirkless servant species made through genetic engineering technology available to Mankind by the time we hit the Singularity."

"That or figuring out a way to give entire Mankind functional immortality alongside sterility, to avoid progressing towards the Singularity any further." Chiyo adds. "Or just some sort of brain-upload scheme. You can't have a quirk if you're a humanoid robot or live in a simulation. It's all a matter of whether the technological singularity will hit us before the quirk one will."

"So, there is a large chance that Nedzu won't share the truth, even in the future, simply because he will habituate himself into thinking that there is no way of avoiding the Singularity due to the rat himself failing to do that." Aizawa decides to cut the technological speculations short. "Well, that's just an additional point on my long list of personal complaints that I want to shove down the rat's throat. Also quirk-suppressors are a no-go."

"Not necessarily." Chiyo surprises him. "We can't hope to suppress 'quirks', which means that regardless of what we do, we can't avoid the Quirk Singularity. However, there is an alternative. It's rather clear that in a stressful situation, it's possible to activate your quirk slightly more than normally, or even awaken it prematurely."

Right, Kirishima.

"This indicates that adrenaline can at the very least stimulate the quirk's activation." Chiyo replies. "I believe that there should be a compound that, especially if mixed with some light sedatives, should impair control or output of quirks. I expect a mountainload of side-effects, and someone will probably find a way to empower the manifestation of quirks in a similar way and start selling that as a combat drug, but at least theoretically the cure you're looking for might be there, Commissioner Aizawa."

Well, they can only hope.